I made this bread to go with an amazing fish stew that my friend Kat and I made. We made it out of desperation really, as it was late on a Sunday and there was nowhere decent to buy bread. Anyway, the point of the story is that this took less than a hour from start to the picture below and its delicious! I don’t normally go in for bread making, I can leave it to the experts, but this is easy peasy, try it!
Also, I love the fact that it doesn’t contain yeast, for health reasons and the fact that we made this out of ingredients we already had!
Wholemeal Soda Bread
- 400ml buttermilk (or 400ml milk with a squeeze of lemon juice left to sour for 5mins)
- 350g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
- 175g wholemeal flour,
- 50g butter , straight from the fridge, diced
- 1 tsp caster sugar
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
Rub the cubes of butter into the flour until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the rest of the dry ingredients and mix. Add the nearly all the milk and mix carefully until you form a slightly sticky dough. Add the rest of the liquid or more flour if you need to. Flour a surface, tip the dough out and shape into a rough round. Cut a cross into the top of the dough, brush with oil, sprinkle with sea salt and bake at 180°C for 25-30mins until golden. To test if its done, tap the bottom and it should sound hollow. Serve with plenty of butter dipped into homemade soup.
. They’re completely non-stick so you don’t need to faff with lining cake tins, although I do grease mine with a little sunflower oil to make sure the cakes come out really cleanly. The flexible nature also means you can bake cakes in lots of different shapes (my current favourite being hearts, see below) and they last for ages!
